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This is the first in what will become a series of articles on development processes and techniques in use at my current place of work, Public Desire. To start off with I’m going to take a run through our docker based development environment, then in future articles I might dip into our deployment processes and testing. In my usual fashion I’m going to stay away from delving too deeply into the concepts and technical gubbins underlaying Docker and concentrate on the pragmatic business of getting a dev environment up and running. If you’ve wanted to give docker a try, but found it a little intimidating give this a shot….

Hi there, been a long time… nearly 6 months since I last posted anything. Having a kid will do that to ya!

Anyway, this week I picked myself up a nifty little 2 in 1 tablet / laptop thingy from a chinese manufacturer I’d never heard of: The Chuwi Hi10 pro. For a grand total of £190 (£20 of which was import duty) I got this little beauty (after waiting a couple of weeks for delivery)

For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a platform to solve one of the problems I’ve seen repeated across numerous businesses in the ‘fast fashion’ ecommerce space. The problem is how to update your homepage and site with the numerous promotions you’re running in a timely fashion without impacting site performance. For the majority of businesses in this space, Magento is the platform of choice for the web facing side of the business. Unfortunately Magento’s tools for this particular problem are lacking. Smaller businesses tend to use CMS blocks with javascript timers to make sure their promotions show at the right time. Moving up the scale, we have plugins for magento that allow cms blocks to be shown on a schedule. And at the top end of the cost spectrum we have ‘personalization’ platforms that, as well as offering variant testing and personalization also offer the ability to schedule blocks of content.

I’ve just updated my dynamic proxy server in node.js to support file injection, and the stripping of headers that prevent loading targeted pages in iframes. This may all sound very nefarious, but I actually require this functionality in a (super secret) project I’m working on….

So, the time has come once again when I’m looking for new job opportunities. As of the 1st of June I’ll be available for any fantastically interesting permanent opportunities in and around Manchester (Uk) or remote working.

you can view my linkedin profile here for a quick history of my experience, and if you want any further details contact me at [email protected] for a copy of my resume.

In my previous post, I explored the idea of introducing software development principles to the world of infrastructure, specifically the translation of the ‘MVC’ design pattern to logically divide infrastructure into 3 distinct layers. Today I’m going to take a look at each of these layers in more depth, and examine how they fit together and what benefits this logical division offers.

This will be a slight departure from my usual posts about random bits of code and have more a focus on architecture.

In the last few years the world of development has seen quite a bit of upheaval as it adapts to new ways of working, the devops movement has, when implemented well, proven incredibly effective in increasing ‘throughput’ of code as well as offering opportunities for team empowerment and increased stability of the final product. Unfortunately, that ‘when implemented well’ is sometimes a sticking point. The idea behind devops is too integrate development and operations, to make operations (ie: deployments, infrastructure) more code driven and automated. What happens when it’s implemented badly though is that a separate ‘devops’ team is setup within an organisation, the majority of the members being sysadmins with maybe one guy who knows how to write bash scripts. I’ll cover devops in more depth in another post, but what I want to focus on in this post is the move towards software defined architectures, and how that movement can be harnessed effectively.

Recently I’ve been tinkering with an idea I call nodeploy, for which I needed a dynamic proxy server…. ie, one I could change the configuration of on the fly. I looked at HaProxy and nginx, both of which offer very limited or overly complex functionality that kind of did what I needed, but not really… so I decided to write something myself.

As per this thread on reddit, here’s my script for importing products into magento via an excel file. Some of it, specifically the attributes and attribute sets are hardcoded in places, but other than that it should be generally applicable to most stores. It makes use of the PHPExcel library for loading the data from an xls or xlsx file.